Posted
by
timothyon Friday May 21, 2010 @07:40PM
from the super-easy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am sure that many other Slashdotters have noticed an increase in ARM-based netbooks over the past several months. For example, the Augen E-Go. It is a widely touted theory that it is impossible to install Linux on one of these notebooks, replacing the commonly installed Windows CE operating system. The sub-$100 netbooks carry decent specs, including 533MHz ARM processor; 128MB DDR RAM; and a 2GB Flash drive, as well as most expected netbook components (USB, Wi-Fi, etc.). I find it hard to believe that a computer with these specs is impossible to hack and install Linux to, but Google searches have been largely unsuccessful in finding proper information. Do any Slashdot readers have experience in installing ARM Linux distros to these cheap netbooks like this? If so, what distros do they recommend?"
(In particular, I wonder if anyone can comment on Ubuntu on ARM.)

Indeed. I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu for these simply because it's designed for typical desktop machines with gigs of memory, and all the "pretty" is no good when all you've got is 128MB. But Debian with an appropriately lightweight window manager should be up to it.

[quote]If it's good enough for the Beagleboard, it's good enough for a netbook. Also check Youtube for live demos.[/quote]OK, let's put it this way: I just tried to install 10.04 on a 400MHz K6 with 160MB of RAM (and plenty of swap) and when it tried to boot the install, the only thing that appeared was a message that said the OOM killer had taken out the system logger.

Since you post AC, I can't give you mod points.But your observation is fine, and important. This is a serious bug: One must not be able to install a distro into what cannot boot up.File this bug for all of us, please!

I believe we were talking about Ubuntu Netbook Remix, not Ubuntu Big Honking Desktop Version. You could click on the link in the summary, google 'beagleboard,' or go to Youtube. That's what I did, took two minutes. I mean, here you are using the Internet, without really using the Internet.

Mod parent up. I've resurrected several old (Win95/98 era) PCs around the house with LFS. Only downside is you'd be compiling for dozens of hours, if not days on those rigs. Of course, you could always cross-compile from a modern PC.

I have been using Gentoo (and love it) for several years now. I have not actually tried LFS although I am familiar with its basic concepts. Can you advise why you would prefer LFS over Gentoo? It seems you'd be giving up the ease of long-term administration that Portage offers, and so far as I know Gentoo does support the ARM platform.

Back in the day (ie, when the MobilePro 780 and similar "netbooks" were about and popular with Linux hackers - maybe 8-9 years ago), there were some non-trivial limitations to booting Linux or a BSD on the devices.

The problem was that there was no way to actually boot Linux natively without chainloading from within CE. Sure, the hardware worked, but the CE ROM address was hardcoded within the "BIOS", and there was no way to circumvent it.

As a result, booting was/is a 5-minute (manual) process due to CE's boot. It's highly cumbersome.

Additionally (and possibly somewhat related), I noticed that around 2004 or so, all of the "mobile computing" or "Borg-like computing" project pages, targeted products, and the like just sort of disappeared. Stuff like the "matchbox PC" from Stanford, twiddler keyboards (think that's what they called them), IR (etc.) keyboards for Palm, et al, and misc. other peripherals became difficult to find. No new products were coming to market in that segment.

Cool project pages where people had some interesting software work for mobile computing (including novel input/output devices) just kind of stopped being updated. Kernel porting and hardware support projects (eg. Linux on the MobilePro 780/880) were abandoned. I don't get it, but I'm going to have to guess that emergence of the first widely accessible smartphones distracted these adventurous types, or the hackable geek-preferred hardware simply dried up. It's really too bad. (Maybe the economy or impending adulthood had somethign to do with it, too?)

That said, I have good news and bad news: the good news is that it looks like the "embedded" computer with a keyboard is coming back (See: Viliv S7). Unfortunately, I also suspect that x86 Intel hardware will dominate the market instead of the "cooler" ARM hardware (OMG, Mooreland is impressive). We'll see how much that matters, but I hope "not very" - and we're able to have our cake and eat it too, despite (because of?) the Intel badging.

My hope (and guess) is that we'll have decently powerful MeeGo/Moblin/Maemo powered cell phones at a reasonable price within two years or so - whether that's what the vendor shipped on them or not.

I have to agree. I've had experience installing Linux on ARM and other "exotic" systems, they all seem to be very picky about what systems will work and what won't. You will have to boot into CE just to get it to load, and it will run like a dog.

Drivers will be your biggest hurdle if you can actually get it to run, as between models they seem to change up hardware continually.

I'd pretty much drop the idea unless you want to build it from scratch or input man hours into helping a dying ARM Linux project.

Let's see: you can currently buy a capable Atom based mini-ITX board with a dual core processor for under $70 - sufficient system for a small office network server, workstation, and pretty much any common task. It's got lower power use than the competitors in the same price range as well as more performance. (In fact, the Atom boards are a bit cheaper than the cheapest Via and AMD board/CPU combos - and mostly fanless.)

Now consider that the latest Atom has a TDP of 2 watts, and in-use power utilization about average for existing smartphone platforms. It might not immediately/seamlessly boot Windows 7, but I'd wager a bet that someone will figure out how to get it to work on account of it being an x86 chip. And a common Linux distro might very well be able to install without too much kludgery, too.

This is something that just a couple years ago (when Atom first came out, there about) everyone said was impossible: Intel would never have anything that would compete with ARM processors on power utilization and performance. Yet these Mooreland CPUs appear to have just as much (if not more) performance than the latest, greatest Snapdragon and the iPad's SoC. Also consider how incredibly fast Intel came to market with this CPU (vs. the much more linear progression we've seen in the ARM platforms over the past decade).

You're grealty underestimating Atom power usage and overestimating ARM one; they are typically at least an order of magnitude apart, quite often two.

Now consider that in my damn Wintel PC (or...in those Atom ones you mention) there is most likely more ARM cores than x86 ones; to say nothing of all the devices around me.Heck, virtually all mobile phones are built around ARM. Even that is, at worst, around the number of all PCs in existence...but annually.

Back in the day, the reason that the MobilePro 780 (and friends) had severe limitations running Linux/BSD was due to the design of the hardware. WinCE was installed into mask programmable ROMs. This meant that it was impossible to replace the code at the locations the processors vectored to when doing a reset. This meant that deep sleep was impossible.

These days, the OS is held in flash memory, and can be replaced more easily. Most of the systems I've played with it has been possible to replace things.

Debian is a possibility, but Ubuntu won't work. Ubuntu has been updated to a newer arm instruction set than the one used in a lot of these netbooks.

The problem with these things is, unlike x86, ARM has no BIOS. Your kernel/image has to be customized to work with all the chips that particular netbook has. This would be easier if they all had the same CPUs/SoCs, but they all vary quite a bit.

I've seen vt8500 netbooks, wm8505's, Samsung SC2410's, 7802's, cheap x86-i386 knockoffs, and MIPS based netbooks. None use the same boot loaders (!), and few have the same instruction sets. (!) Those that do do not have the same LCD controllers or other components, and usually all drivers are closed source. (if available at all)

If you've got one and want to chat, join the IRC on freenode.net, channel #easypc

Most of the hackers and developers there have different kinds of netbooks, and only one each, but pooling knowledge has been handy. Apparently vt8500/wm8505 netbooks usually have a read-only card reader that needs to be soldered to be fixed. My Anyka 7802 netbook ($58 shipped!) doesn't have this problem, but it has no drivers available. Not even Android runs on it.

There's a dozen or so people in the channel, so if you've got questions (or maybe answers), join in. Note: We're all in different timezones. Responses can take hours, or if you're lucky minutes.

Yet, that does not actually solve the problem. If you think it does, you don't understand the problem.

These devices only have 128M of RAM. That's not much: you won't be running X terribly well, nevermind a modern desktop. And the available packages for 'lightweight' stuff is woefully unequipped for something like this.

What the OP really should be looking at is MeeGo/Moblin or Maemo - though with only 128M of RAM, they might be a bit under powered for even that.

Yeah, I've got a MobilePro 780 - it has 32MB RAM; I've got X running on it with ion3 under NetBSD. NetBSD 2.0. It barely runs - and this is an old TinyX (nanox? I can't recall) X server.

I had a P133 with 16MB of RAM, too. That ran icewm well.

The problem is that this isn't 1997, and X implementations are significantly bloated these days compared to back then. There have been a lot of changes - many have which have been acceptable improvements (memory use for performance improvements, support, etc.). Even the 'tiny' X implementations have this problem.

MeeGo & Qt (on which MeeGo UI is being built upon) to the rescue, eventually? Qt Embedded can run without X, via QWS [nokia.com]. Maybe there won't be much of a problem with having a MeeGo variant which gets rid of X (hence also compatibility with Moblin / non-Qt software...)

Every few years, there are efforts to remove X, to address a perception that X is a source of bloat. GTK has a few framebuffer backends, for example.

They ultimately fail for a few reasons.

The primary reason is that the non-X version of the toolkit will not be commonly used, and fall out of date quickly.The secondary reason is that removing X requires reinvention of things like window management, key focus and direction, direct graphics/opengl access.

Yes, we always thought X Windows was a bit bloated, back in the late 80s, on a 386/33. I don't remember how much RAM it had (if I still have to files to look that up, they're on a 9-track tape or maybe a 60MB Sun cartridge...) It was a bit faster than running NeWS on a diskless Sun3/50 with 8MB RAM, but NeWS was so much cleaner most of the time that it was the better system.

Evidently you've not read too many specifications, then, because it is absolutely nothing of the sort.

I think you'll find many, many specs not only use "should", "may", and other such words, they actually go to some lengths to provide precise (and useful) definitions for them before doing so.

(For those of you playing along at home: I've noticed that use of the term "weasel-word" is usually a cover for "I can't be arsed to do my homework, so I'll just parrot something I read on Wikipedia".)

Mod parent up. The biggest limitation is the amount of RAM. Sure, 128MB may be fine for certain limited applications, but it'll be the bottleneck for any decent web browsing or any kind of multitasking. I think 256MB may be the bare minimum for comfortable web browsing, mostly based on the fact that any device I've used with only 128MB seemed to just fall a bit short of being really usable. Perhaps someone with a 192MB device (T-Mobile G1?) can chime in with their experience.

***Well, then you'll be stuck on static pages, and will be impossible to render and navigate through "modern" pages.***

And that would be bad -- why? Speaking for myself, I'm a bit hazy why resource hungry modern web pages that more often than not don't render correctly in any browser are desirable.

BTW, I'm posting this using the OffByOne browser in Windows 98 running under QEMU using 128mb of RAM. I imagine it would run just as well in 64mb -- maybe less. Might work in Windows 95. Maybe I'll try that so

I've got SeaMonkey running just fine (if a bit slowly) on almost anything besides Flash content. This is on PuppyLinux 4.0, on a Pentium 1 with 64 Mib of RAM (2 used up by integrated graphics.) Although this is an older version of SeaMonkey from before it used XUL.

If you need ultra-lightweight browsing and just can't stomach Lynx (or elinks), I've had success with Dillo [dillo.org]. It supports basic HTML (text and images) and CSS1. If you can't get it in your distro's package manager, Dillo is easy to compile and doesn't require anything special. (simple./configure && make && make install should do the trick)

You can do this with Debian. You do a minimal install, and then add the packages you need after that. It's more difficult than a default desktop installation because you need to know what is required rather than have Debian make the choices for you, but it is very possible.

I'm a Debian guy, but I should note: you can do this on RedHat/CentOS, too - though the 'minimal install' has grown substantially in recent years.

I really wish the 'minimal install' would not include such 'necessities' like snmpd and a mail daemon. I neither need nor want those security-issue packages on many installs (or want an alternative) and they're not appreciated. (BSDs are particularly prone to this nonsense. Sendmail and bind? Seriously? Can I get the machine pre-rooted?)

It comes from the "ZOMG, you want to run Linux, therefore you want to run a server/are a sysadmin/are a programmer" mindset. Of course, if they didn't include Apache, sendmail, bind, etc by default, you'd have all those programmers/sysadmins saying how Distro-foo is dumbed down for the masses.

Perhaps. But consider that if the user hadn't submitted the story there would have been other effects lost. For instance, by reading this article I found out about the E-Go, which I'd never heard of before. I also found out about Angstrom for the ARM architecture.

If we all kept as quiet as you appear to want then the spread of ideas and information might happen at a much slower pace.

Perhaps. But consider that if the user hadn't submitted the story there would have been other effects lost. For instance, by reading this article I found out about the E-Go, which I'd never heard of before. I also found out about Angstrom for the ARM architecture.

If we all kept as quiet as you appear to want then the spread of ideas and information might happen at a much slower pace.

I am the AC who wrote that post that you replied to.

Thank you for taking the time to say that. Sometimes people say things that makes me reconsider my position and you Sir did me that favor today. I was hasty and didn't think about what you might call the positive externalities. Still, I think having independence and being able to find your own answers is a very important skill. It is something that separates the helpless and needlessly dependent sheep from those who have some guts and are willing to

What I want to know is where one actually picks up these "sub $100" netbooks, because every time I try to find one to actually purchase it is "coming soon" or delayed. Hell I wouldn't give a shit what OS it runs if you can pick one up for $100 or less and it has Wifi.

I don't even get why these arm based machines come with windows ce, that's just setting the user up for disappointment... Sure it looks like windows, but won't run any of the apps people would expect to run on it....Linux at least doesn't create such a false impression, and has a much wider array of applications readily available for it.

I don't know why linux hasn't supplanted CE in this area; but I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that most of the low-end ARM-based "netbooks" are pretty much the direct architectural descendants of the pocketPCs of old, just in a different case/form factor.

The SmartQ devices tripple boot Android, Ubuntu, and Wince, so it's not that difficult to produce something cheaply that comes with different OS options... I'm quite tempted by their V5 as a replacement for my ageing Nokia 770.

With Linux on ARM is that ARM devices are substantially less standardized that x86s are when it comes to such niceties as the preboot/early stage of boot process.

Because of the decades-long Wintel monopoly, pretty much any x86 board(with the exception of a few oddball embedded things and OLPCs), boots in almost the same way. Worst case, the ACPI implementation is so shot that you have to boot with -noacpi in order to get the kernel up and running.

ARM devices, though, have had considerable freedom to do their own thing, so long as the vendor provided a BSP that papered over the weirdness enough to run the OS of the customer's choice(historically WinCe/VXworks, more recently this has included Linux). On the plus side, this has meant some fairly interesting capabilities in some of the bootloaders. On the minus side, this has meant a multitude of bootloaders(a few OSS, redboot, u-boot), some fairly common, and some horrid oddball crap that even Google has only heard mentioned a few times.

If you can get the kernel booted, userland is not such a big deal. Debian has had a pretty decent one for a while, and the Ubuntu guys have recently been doing some "suitable for low-rez screens" type polishing. The issue will be figuring out the bootloader. And, of course, there is absolutely no assurance that the drivers for whatever oddball devices are crammed into the cheapo SoiCs in these things exist, or work properly.

If you get to the stage of "what distro do I want", you are ahead of the game.

Yup, that's how you ran other operating systems on a number of PDA-type devices. Unfortunately, for the same reasons outlined by the grandparent, it needs modification for each target machine and it also requires you to be able to install stuff in Wince that runs in privileged mode.

WinCE based boot loaders have existed for the past 10-12 years. But there's a problem with them. You can't replace the code at the reset vectors which is necessary to get the deep sleep modes working properly. You can run Linux or BSD on the box, but you'll not be able to suspend the laptop, nor will you be able to easily script the booting. If you are relying on WinCE to do the booting, you're also not able to reclaim that space in the Flash memory either.

Sure, Linux runs on lots of CPUs, and would have no problem on ARM, and probably even supports all the devices on the systems in question. The trick is finding a way to install it, and that's where the hacking comes in. How does the system boot? Can you modify the boot image to install Linux? Does the BIOS (or whatever equivalent) insist on only booting digitally-signed boot images like video game consoles do? Those questions may have different answers for each device.

In most cases, I would think it shouldn't be too hard, as they aren't likely to bother with digital signatures, and they probably have some mechanism for installing an upgraded or patched operating system (for bug fixes, if nothing else). Someone has to buy one and figure out how to do it.

Is more a tablet or a cellphone than a netbook, but the N900 runs it, and is ARM based. And probably will be a Meego version for it too soon. Anyway, the N900 have twice that RAM, completes to 1gb counting the swap, and several times that flash on storage, you could feel a bit stretched with it.

There are also several mini linux distributions specially targetted to low ram/hardware (i.e. damn small linux), but not sure if there are ARM ports of them.

I've already posted in this thread elsewhere, but I just thought I might add: Google is likely part of your problem (inability to find anything useful).

I've noticed lately that Google has become much less of a useful resource when looking up technical information. You're more likely to find a useful link with "stupid" queries, but any level of complexity results in two out of three being only-sorta related. It's a mess, and historically useful search formatting (quoting, -, +, etc.) no longer really help.

I really hope a better alternative comes along soon (or google releases "geek.google.com" or some such thing - with the old indexing). The lack of good search results (nay, worse results) has really made my life more difficult.

Adding to what i.r.id10t said - how often did you use search annotations and moving results up/down when that was available? Plus in new search sidebar there's "fewer shopping sites"; that and strong position of sites which are good starting hubs of information is probably most Google can do; at least untill they have strong AI.

Looking at the specs given by the OP, I am wondering why you would go to the trouble of installing Linux on one of these machines (other than geek cred) when you could just get a MIPS based netbook with similar specs that comes with Linux, e.g. the CnMbook. I got one for £90 last year, it's slow as hell but does the job for basic web access etc when I don't want to carry around a full sized laptop.

I might add that putting a full-featured Linux distro (e.g. replacing the basic Linux install it ships with with Debian or the like) on the CnMbook doesn't seem too plausible at the moment, there's just too much tweaking necessary, and this is a machine that ships with a Linux variant installed. Trying to put Linux on one of the ARM machines mentioned by the OP when it isn't even supported by the manufacturer seems like more pain than it's worth to me...

The Simpad is an ARM-based tablet computer made by Siemens some years back. It came with WIN CE but people have created a Linux distro called OESF that runs on it and it will run many Sharp Zaurus applications unmodified even though it has a much larger screen than a PDA.

I would expect that people would have to do some boot loader hacking similar to what was done with Simpad, but if you could get that Simpad distro booted on one of these netbooks then you will be past the biggest hurdle in making Ubuntu Net

I have installed Linux on an HP iPAQ hx4700 PDA (624MHz XScale PXA270, 64Mb RAM, 128Mb flash, 480x640 screen).
As others have pointed out the main problems are finding (1) a boot loader and (2) drivers for your device. In the case of the hx4700 these problems were already solved for Familiar Linux (familiar.handhelds.org); SDG Systems produced a boot loader and others produced the kernel patches and drivers.
A more generic boot loader is HaRET (Handheld Reverse Engineering Tool), a Linux bootloader which works from the Windows CE environment. I haven't used it myself because I wiped WinCE off my iPAQ years ago.
Drivers and platforms for ARM devices are being developed for the Linux kernel all the time; check out the source code under./arch/arm. But you may not find exactly the right combination for your device. Being a kernel hacker helps!
As for a Linux distro, I first used Familiar Linux. But that is no longer actively developed. So I switched to Angstrom Linux (www.angstrom-distribution.org). But that doesn't offer the latest version of the Mozilla Fennec browser. And in both cases I found the desktop environment (e.g. GPE) to be too resource hungry.
So I have now rolled my own distro from the latest software sources. In particular I am using a window manager called PAWM (Puto Amo Window Manager), which is small and perfect for a device without a keyboard, and fennec-2.0a1pre built from bleeding edge sources. Yes, they do actually work in 64Mb of RAM! It does take some effort to port, configure, debug and fix the software, but it's fun to do.

How different then, would doing this kind of thing be from installing Linux on a PocketPC/Windows CE device such as an iPaq? Yes, that is possible [handhelds.org], but it is far from straightforward. I imagine the device is significantly different from a standard PC and more like a PocketPC-based ARM handheld or smartphone, and one ought to be considering it as such. I assume that such a device will not have some Palladium [wikipedia.org]-like trusted computing system similar to what one sees in some gaming consoles which prevents one f

The problem with portable computing devices -- at least the ones that aren't tied to an expensive cell plan -- is that they are such narrow margin markets that few manufacturers are interested in them. Let's say that you want a lightweight, long battery life, portable computer with a full-sized keyboard to do actual work on: word processor, spreadsheet, or for the more technically inclined, a text editor and a copy of gcc, and you don't give a shit about watching video or browsing Flash-heavy sites.

Good luck with that.

It's not that there's any technical barrier involved here. You could do all of that just fine on a 90MHz Pentium fifteen years ago, or even a 50MHz 80486 twenty years ago. Odds are that the processor and memory in a third-rate cell phone could blow those specs away. Add a real screen and a keyboard, and you've got a device that could retail under $100. Of course, that means that it would probably wholesale for around $40, and the manufacturer's profit would likely be a couple of bucks, but only for the month or two it would take every factory in Taiwan to rush out clones. And that's provided it wasn't stillborn because every clueless tech "journalist" started bitching about how you couldn't watch video or play the latest games on it. Frankly, you can't really blame the manufacturers for not wanting to jump on that wagon.

So instead, we get the overpriced toys of the netbook world which, while capable computing platforms in the abstract, are so crippled by their toy keyboards that they're basically DVD viewers with built-in web browsers. It's like the final, terrifying revenge of WebTV.

I suspect that if you want something else, you're going to have to find an otherwise suitable netbook and substantially modify the hardware yourself. Personally, I've been giving serious thought to stuffing the guts of a netbook inside of a vintage IBM Model M keyboard and building a custom cover for it.

PCs are easy because their behavior is very simple and effectively, hasn't changed much since the beginning. But ARMs are a dime a dozen and used in various things from lightweight controllers to cellphones. Your PC might very well have several ARM processors inside it.

As a result, every ARM system is different - the memory map is different, the interrupt controller is different between SoC vendors, peripherals are located at different spots, etc. The only real constant is that ARMs boot at 0x0, but many SoCs have boot ROMs that are mapped at that area, which load a bootloader off storage at some arbitrary memory location and jumps there. End result, on ARM, you need to build a kernel/bootloader that's specific to your hardware.

On a PC, it's pretty much a monoculture and you know where things are in physical memory space. Things are located at well known addresses. On a PC, then, it's effectively the same architecture. That's why there's so many OSes available because the basic kernel needs are all the same across every PC, ranging from low power embedded systems to super 128-core behemoths - you know where RAM starts, how the BIOS will load you and where, how the interrupt controller, timer hardware, etc., work, and how to talk to more advanced peripherals via interfaces like ACPI. Hell, about the biggest change in PCs is the slow move to EFI based firmware, but they implement a BIOS compatibility module for backwards compatibility.

Try writing a program where you don't know where you're going to be located in memory, hardware you don't know where it might be located, interrupt controllers that can change wildly, etc without requiring reconfiguration and recompilation, and it's impossible. That's the current state of ARM systems...

The problem with changing what an arm device runs is in the bootloader that arm devices run. What most arm devices have is firmware that not only configures the CPU and other devices but loads the OS. Unlike a PC where it loads some code off the first sector of the drive most arm devices actually have the code to load the file system, put a file in memory, and execute it. This is great except there is no standard on how to do this and can be configured from very easy to change(i.e just change the file it loads) to very hard(i.e the firmware checks the file checksum). Your best bet is to do some googling on the device and see who makes the CPU. Then google and CPU and you should find what the standard firmware the manufacture uses. Next you need to hook a serial device(most devices have these just no serial port on the board, you need to sodier it on). Then you can start hacking away.
Marvell based devices are great since the OpenRD and Netplug devices have plenty of documentation and they all use the same boot loader and such.

So here's a little more background for those who haven't followed development of it closely:

MeeGo is the arranged marriage of Intel's Moblin + Nokia's Maemo.

MeeGo is still under heavy development, and although source and builds are available, everything is still experimental.

The steering group is "planning [a] release of MeeGo version 1 in the second quarter of 2010", according to the FAQ [meego.com]. It'll be here soon; don't start making plans to run it as your daily OS until v1.0 is actually released.

To give a taste of how raw development of the OS is right now, even basic tutorials on how to write a "Hello, World" application aren't useful to the community yet [meego.com] as most tutorials depend upon the MeeGo SDK, a component that hasn't yet been released by Intel.

But what you care about most is: "Will it run on my hardware?"

The best place to determine that is on the Devices [meego.com] page on the MeeGo Wiki. If you find that you can run the current development images on a different piece of hardware, please make a note of it on that page.

There is nothing inherently difficult about Linux on ARM. I have installed Gentoo on two such systems, a Buffalo Linkstation and a Nokia N800 (though the latter runs Maemo most of the time). These devices were designed for Linux to begin with.

IMHO, it is much better to support manufacturers that support Linux. Even if you get Linux running on one of these WinCE devices, you are supporting a closed monoculture by buying it.

As of netbooks, there are two currently available in online stores that I find pa

> The last time I mentioned these, some people complained that the Lemote is not actually available anywhere, so here are two places:

I can guess the.nl site isn't where I should look so try the.com. Lets see, UK only keyboard, Shipped from Europe and paid in Euros (more fees) and at prices higher than a lot of higher spec hardware without those problems. And you get to buy it from a tiny site that can't even spring for an SSL cert. I know I'm eager to put my credit card in that. Sounds like 'not av

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit last November, one of the Ubuntu ARM guys did a plenary presentation where the machine hooked to the projector was an ARM machine running Ubuntu. I also saw Jonathan Riddell looking for a USB mouse so he could install Kubuntu on an ARM machine he'd been handed.

- Create ARM VM (Qemu does this)- Create development image/environment (Qemu can do ARM)- Build an ARM image- Test in emulator/simulator- Install with one of several methods - the Debian Installer works on ARM, for example.- Test, log notes for yourself, and repeat the build process----http://cross-lfs.org/view/clfs-embedded/arm/introduction/how.html>

"The CLFS system will be built by using a previously installed Linux distribution (such as Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, SUSE, or Ubuntu). This existing Linux s

While(unless your time is worth about $.30 an hour) these make lousy primary machines(and, unfortunately, due to the fact that many of them are cheap junk, they don't have compensating advantages like 15 hour battery lives, or ultralight weight), that doesn't mean they are without use.

~$80-$100 for a complete embedded system, with LCD and inputs, and a reasonable set of peripherals opens up all sorts of interesting projects, if you can get your OS of choice on there.